ADA Compliance Website Checklist

ADA Compliance Website Checklist

If you are a person who has no idea about the term ADA compliance: it stands for ‘Americans with Disabilities Act’. Just like any other legal Act, it is also a set of guidelines or regulations that help physically limited users!

The Act was passed in 1990 and long before e-commerce was just a part of everyday life. Website compliance is imperative to avoid a government action or lawsuit. It is also important to offer an equal opportunity for everyone to enjoy offered goods/services if they have a disability or not.

In this post, we will discuss useful insight on ADA compliance website checklist. This will help you easily navigate through basic ADA regulations.

The law holds a wider scope and is applicable to:

Public and private spaces

Local government and state

Employment

Transportation

Telecommunication

To a lot of us, accessing a website is second nature. However, there are some people with physical disability and for them, it becomes challenging (in a few cases) to access the services and tools offered by a different website.

Thus in order to keep the website and its services accessible to everyone, ADA standards regulations are developed and required to adhere while developing a website.

The Major Four Components of ADA Compliance Websites

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) explains itself as the international community where a full-time staff, public, and Member organization work together in order to develop Web standards.

The standards or guidelines are further broken down by using four major principles:

Operable

Perceivable

Robust

Understandable

Under each of these principles are some guidelines which offer certain goals towards which a website is supposed to work. Under each of these guidelines are testable success criteria, graded as A, AA, or AAA.

These grades indicate the conformity level of accessibility. For instance, AAA is considered as the highest.

Indeed, the law requires A and AA guidelines to be fulfilled only. However, what is highly important to comprehend in such guidelines are all the principles and how these principles apply to a website.

Perceivable

User interface and information components should be presentable to all users in ways that are perceivable. This principle makes sure that all the content is available to view in different or multiple forms. Also, it is easy to hear and see regardless of any disability.

Some of the examples include:

Alternative options for CAPTCHA

Placing the alt text tag on any image

Providing captions for every media content

Operable

User interface navigation and components must be operable. This principle makes sure that the user can simply navigate the website and without running into restricted or limited functionality or even time limits.

Understandable

The operation and information of the user interface should be understandable. The principle makes sure that all WebPages are predictable, readable and have the tendency to rectify user mistake.

Some of the examples include:

The navigation of your website remains constant throughout the website

You give instructions for all input fields of users

A user can confirm the financial transaction prior to submitting the order.

Robust

Content needs to be robust enough so that it could be interpreted most reliably and by a wide range of user agents. This may include assistive technologies. This principle makes sure the compatibility between, all current as well as future technologies and your website, should help anyone who uses them.

Some of the examples include:

The HTML documents should contain start and end tags and must not contain duplicate attributes

A user must programmatically ascertain the role and name of a user interface form

So how can you prepare for these new ADA standards?

For this, talk to your website developer to ascertain how they accommodate the upcoming regulatory changes of 2018. Even if you are planning on a complete website redesign, go with a service provider that truly understand the significance of such compliance standards and understand how to meet these guidelines, accurately.

Levels of Compliance

The guidelines of WCAG 2.0 are exclusively developed in order to direct the owners of non-compliant websites to fully transform their websites without having any difficulty.

In total, there are 3 distinctive confirmation levels and success criteria:

Level A

While it is not the most difficult compliance, it offers the least benefit to disabled users. The prime focus of this compliance level is to make it easier for reading on multiple browsers and also to translate and navigate the website.

While it seems like an improvement for a lot of websites, it not really makes a website as much access as the DOJ like it to be.

Level A comprises of this website accessibility guidelines:

Images need to have alternate text, readable by a screen reader software

Recorded video content must include captions

Audio-only or video content must accompany by description or text transcript

Links must be provided to different media players that require viewing content

The functionality of ‘skip navigation’ must enable keyboard users to instantly access content

Page titles succinctly and clearly describe page content

Links and buttons are logically and clearly named

Elements that receive focus must not change content in a considerable way

Invalid input on the form must be identified to the user

Forms need to have legends and labels that should be readable by screen reader software

There must not be any major validation error.

Level AA Compliance

This compliance level is a little bit more important and makes the website quite accessible to individuals with a wider variety of disabilities. This may include all the common barrier s to use.

It will not affect the feel or look of the website as much as the compliance level AAA does. But it includes guidance of error identification and on color contrast.

Most of the businesses are required to aim for level AA conformity sine this compliance level is expected to fully reflect the accessibility level expected by the DOJ.

WCAG 2.0 – level AA – seems to be roughly equivalent to the section 508 standards, even though WCAG documentation is particularly specific and more explicitly defined than information included in 508 sections.

Level AAA comprises on the following guidelines:

Live audio captions i.e. provide all the live audio content with captions

Text Contrast – images of text and text content must have a contrast ratio of 4:5:1. This is not applicable to images of large-scale text or large-scale text. These images should have the contrast ration – 3:1. Images of text which are part of the website’s user interface and serve the design purpose only have no requirements of contrast. Text which is the part of the logo or even the brand name has a minimum or none contrast requirements.

Offer user the option to resize the text up to 200% without the use of assistive technology or loss of functionality and content.

In order to convey information than images, use text wherever possible

Navigation – offer different ways to fully locate web pages.

Use labels and headings to describe the purpose and topics of web component

Ensure that focus indicator of the keyboard is visible across all interfaces

Make sure that the language of each phrase or paragraph in the content of the website is ascertainable through browsing software of the user. This is not applicable to technical terms, proper names, indeterminate language words, jargon or slang of the surrounding text and phrases and words that are dialect’s part.

The navigational mechanism that is repeated by means of multiple web pages must occur in the same order every time they get repeated

Components having the same functionality need to be identified consistently

In terms of input errors, make sure user get the correctional suggestions, in case, they are known

Ensure security of financial and legal data transactions by ensuring they are reversible, users are given the option to recheck their input data and a proper confirmation mechanism is given before submission finalization.

Level AAA Compliance

This is one of the most demanding compliance levels of accessibility. It significantly impacts on the website design. However, it also makes your website accessible to a wide variety of people having disabilities.

As stated earlier, each WCAG 2.0 principle has a list of guidelines. Each of these guidelines contains compliance standards with failure examples and techniques at each level. Some of these include items of level A, others include items related to multiple compliance levels. In this manner, different websites include basic elements at multiple and different accessibility levels.

Level AAA compliance contains the following guidelines:

Support every prerecorded audio content with proper sign language interpretation

Comprehensive audio descriptions. Make sure extended audio descriptions for every prerecorded video content in which the foreground audio cannot be paused and also provide audio descriptions.

Provide relevant alternatives for all prerecorded audio and video content

Text Contrast – images of text and text content must have a contrast ratio of 7:1. This is not applicable to images of large-scale text or large-scale text. These images should have the contrast ration – 4.5:1. Images of text which are part of the website’s user interface and serve the design purpose only have no requirements of contrast. Text which is the part of the logo or even the brand name has a minimum or none contrast requirements.

Provide user an option to select the foreground and background colors

The width of content blocks should not exceed 80 glyphs or characters

Ensure that the text is not set as justified

The line spacing should be at least 1.5 spaces – within paragraphs. The spacing of the paragraph must be at least 1.5 times larger than the line spacing.

Ensure that the text is resized up to 200% without the use of assistive technologies and the user must not require scrolling horizontally to read a text line.

Keep images of text for decoration purposes only and when it is important to the information being provided.

Avoid timing as the most important part of an activity or event presented by the content, except for media, non-interactive components, and live events.

Allow users to suppress or postpone interruptions, except in the case of emergency.

Incorporate information on the location of the user within a set of pages

Offer a proper mechanism to interpret abbreviations

Others

The provided list also contains some other principles regarding different aspects of a website that each developer must take into account while designing a website.

For most of the businesses, the ADA web compliance means that they must make a few adjustments to all of the online marketing strategies. If your web designer used responsive web design while creating the online marketing strategies, for instance for your hotel website, you must have already met several ADA compliant regulations.

But the need to make changes with time is inevitable. So the best way to ensure staying ADA compliant is to find the right web developers’ services. Ask them how their development workflow caters accessibility and go with experienced service providers which have all the right tools that check the accessibility of a website.

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COO Teknas

Collaboration with CodeIT gave my business great prospects for its expansion and scaling. Together with CodeIT professionals, we grew our product line from three to fourteen products within only one year. I can rely on these guys to get a high-quality product on time.

Thanks, V

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Director of Engineering and Development Sweet Rush

This was our first project, and I am so happy that it had a smooth run and a successful resolution.
I sincerely hope that this is just the first step in our long and mutually amiable partnership.

Thank you CodeIT team for being so thorough and professional.

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CEO Stilgiyin.com

CodeIT has been working for us for one and a half years. We are ending the project now because it is complete. CodeIT built our platform from scratch and also provided further development and support for the rest of the contract. They are very strong in several areas: back-end development (specialising in Zend Framework); front-end development; server administration; project management. Their project managers speak excellent English and are courteous and professional. Their developers are fast and skilled, and up to date with the latest technologies. Their expertise helped us to build a highly reliable website which can serve a heavy load of traffic. Finally, they are all very nice people, and I cannot recommend them highly enough.

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CEO PitchPersonal

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